A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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Should be easy. If you are a billionaire you should be paying at least 40% in tax. So at least 400 million for each 1 billion you are worth.
If you want to pay less then you need to justify it. So pay up front and refund later. Easy.
No one needs 600M, your tax rate is too low.
I fully agree. Maybe a 70-80 tax on everything over 10 million.
Hfs, i never drew that correlation before. Yeah, fuk them.
It wouldn't be so bad if you couldn't use the unrealized gains. But people can have a bunch of stock, get an untaxed loan, and have access to money without the tax burden. We should fix that.
Also property tax should probably be progressive
Yeah, we should fix that, but it's still pretty bad because it incentivizes investments in stocks (an inherently speculative asset that destabilizes the world) over bonds (a contractually defined asset that more effectively resists speculation and destabilization). Sure, they're both financial assets, so there's a certain amount of nonsense built in, but I'd much prefer a society filled with people who invest in bonds and incentivized to demand financial regulation.
Also, we should treat stocks like dividends and tax them at the same rate. You get money every month from dividends and you choose whether you want to re-invest it or not. You're effectively auto-re-investing with stocks, so it's not meaningfully different. You should have to pay on the yearly difference in value, and if that means you have to sell some to pay the tax then you should just get over it.
They're right: it is pretty complicated to tax the rich using the current tax code. And there's a very good reason for that: they made sure it's as complicated as possible.
I think the idea that taxing the rich is difficult or our tax code is too complicated feeds into the narrative around the problem being too hard to solve. I think the reality is more straightforward:
Bring back the previous top tax bracket of 39% that Republicans did away with. That will bring in a significant revenue.
Raise or add the top brackets on the capital gains taxes.
Add a new top tax bracket of you want to raise more revenue, e.g. 46% above X millions.
When you look at reports by the congressional budget office or independent budget groups, most of the other proposals are noise in the grand scheme of things. Even the buy, borrow, die strategy that gets a lot of airtime (because it rightfully violates most people's sense of fair play) only really accounts for something like 2% of the funds used by the ultra wealthy.
Most of the things like wealth taxes would require more complex legislation and be treated by the courts, certainly going to the supreme court. But the above three bullets would meaningfully raise revenues, are simple in terms of legislation, and have clear statutory authority and case law on their side.
The only thing hard is electing enough people who actually care about the budget and the people.
Income tax may be a solution to government revenue, but it's not a solution to inequality.
Capital accumulates exponentially, and if you don't address that exponential growth, then there will be ludicrously wealthy people, social immobility, and all the problems we have now. Tax wealth.
Of course it will be complicated. Of course there will be court cases. All of that is true of the current system. We can't get to a working system if we don't even start. Tax wealth.
Capital gains should just be taxed as regular income instead of having a special rate.
How difficult would it be to enact legislation to prevent using loans against stock/assets and avoiding income/capital gains tax? Something like "if you have things worth money you need to sell them before taking a frivolous loan."? Idk I just hate that loophole
Very hard, since you can just take the loan in a different country, even in USD.
Wealth tax is probably much easier.
This was an interesting point I hadn't thought of before, so I wanted an alternate perspective since a Twitter meme is a little one sided, think of it what you will:
Property taxes are ancient — they predate modern stock markets by centuries. Land was the dominant form of wealth, and crucially, you can't hide a house from the assessor. Real estate is immobile, visible, and tied to a specific jurisdiction. Stocks are the opposite: mobile across borders, easy to hold through trusts or shell entities, and private holdings are genuinely hard to value year-over-year.
The other piece is who's collecting and why. Property taxes are local — they fund schools, fire, roads, the stuff that directly makes your property more valuable. There's a clean "benefit" logic: the city paves your street, your house is worth more, you pay for it. A share of Apple isn't enhanced by Seattle paving anything, so there's no equivalent local nexus.
Stocks also already get taxed, just at different moments rather than annually: capital gains when you sell, dividends when paid, corporate income tax on the underlying company, estate tax at death. The argument against an annual wealth-style tax is partly that the system already takes its cut, just not on a recurring basis.
A few countries (Norway, Switzerland, Spain) do tax financial wealth annually, but most that tried it abandoned it — capital flight and valuation headaches. In the US there's also a constitutional wrinkle: the federal government can't easily levy direct taxes on wealth without apportionment among states, which is why Warren/Sanders-style wealth tax proposals have to be carefully structured to survive a court challenge.
Stocks also already get taxed, just at different moments rather than annually: capital gains when you sell, dividends when paid, corporate income tax on the underlying company, estate tax at death. The argument against an annual wealth-style tax is partly that the system already takes its cut, just not on a recurring basis.
Yeah, that's sort of the whole point of the post. If I buy a stock for $1 today and still it for $10 tomorrow, I pay taxes on the gains tomorrow.
If I buy it for $10 today and sell it for $1 tomorrow, I claim it as a loss.
If I buy a house for $100k yesterday, I'm paying taxes on $400k property today, and $900k tomorrow. Even if tomorrow I sell it for $200k.
The system should take more of a cut, if that’s the argument we are going with.
Also? A new realization event should be defined: collateralization. When you take out loans against the value of your stock/bond/whatever holdings, you are realizing gains from those assets - you wouldn’t have gotten the line of credit otherwise.
People argue that this would prevent homeowners for taking equity lines of credit for improvements but that’s easily remedied by the collateral not being a real asset.
For most of our history, real estate was wealth. You needed property to grow crops, mine resources, build a factory, or do any kind of venture that would make money. It's only in the 20th century that we really start having a significant amount of wealth in stock markets that couldn't be directly traced to a physical asset. The robber barons figured that was a good excuse to stop taxing their wealth.
Also of interest: Taxes aren't paid on stock buybacks which is why they became popular.
They’re not taxed because they used to be illegal and they shouldn’t ever be taxed because they should be made illegal again.
The same way prospect (futures) markets should be illegal, as well as options. The rich apparently couldn't make enough with regular stocks so they had to build gambling into it, and then inside trade to make sure they won.
Burn it down.
Because that used to be illegal so there was no need to tax it
The main issue is that, once you have enough value in stock, you can take loans out against it, thus extracting the value of the stock without actually having to sell the stock.
Let's just say they won't pay with money seems to be their current position
100% agreed. This has been going on for some decades, hand-in-hand with "The FED" being so complex that only bankers and their ilk can handle banking, so we must have bankers control their own banking and our dollar.
Banking is easy. You put money in the bank, they save it until you need it for a small fee. But they don't save it any more, you see. They have about one dollar for every 10 dollars deposited. The rest exists only in the banking system itself, and is not a tangible asset.
The complex part is their labyrinthine banking-created machinations to manipulate that one dollar into ten.
I'd get into it, but mods often think anything about The FED is a conspiracy. Don't be like them. Take The Fed at its word, note who serves and where they worked before and after their terms, and reach your own conclusions.
Property taxes are a thing.
Stocks are property.
It's not rocket science.
We need a tax system where the government figures out how much they need each year, and then just takes it proportional to net wealth above a certain amount.
You can bet Elon won't be declaring himself a trillionaire under that system.
We need a tax system where the government figures out how much they need each year, and then just takes it proportional to net wealth above a certain amount.
That's exactly how property taxes work if you replace "net worth" with "assessed property value."
(As opposed to what some people think, that rising property values on their own lead to rising property taxes)
So yeah, why the heck not do the same with other forms of wealth?
Twitter screenshot meme slactivism aside, it's because private land is a limited resource. The more you keep for yourself, the more you pay (generally).
Plus, property tax is one of the only taxes that really hits wealthy people hard.
In California the property taxes are such that it punishes people that didn’t buy a house 30 years ago. The apartment I rent pays property taxes on a valuation of ~$250k. This property just went for sale at $1.2 million. Whoever buys it now will pay property taxes on a $1.2 million valuation, while right now due to how the law is structured, the current owner pays taxes on $250k.
It’s just a big fuck you by the system. The tax law was modified because they saw that if they kept increasing the tax proportionally with the market value of the home, soon a bunch people would lose their homes because wages are stagnant and home prices are rocketing. So they passed this cap that helps current homeowners.
I don’t know if there is a reasonable tax under these conditions where home speculation and investment-mindset inflates home prices while wages are stagnant and inflation is a bustling.
Well thats not a good comparison. Everyone pays property taxes.